imap Alt Space (please help <:( )

[neolus]

Hello, I simply wanted to redirect Alt + Space in insert mode to a plain
space
but this seems more complicated than I thought.

I've only tried i[nore]map <A-Space> <Space>
(or w/ imap <M-Space> <Space>)

but the same behaviour that it its always given me remains.
e.g. in insert I type Alt + Space & my input is grabbed untill I press one
more key
like say Alt + Space, F2 will print <80>

I really hope there's a way, and I hope somebody out there has an idea ?
I already searched alot for this but can't seem to find anyone else w/ the
same problem/need.
Thanks in advance if you're reading this !
Cheers !



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[Bruno Sutic]

Hey,
I've tried to make a plugin that consistently enables alt mappings in vim.
https://github.com/bruno-/vim-alt-mappings

It turns our that's a though problem for command line vim - mostly because enabling alt mappings breaks a lot of other stuff.

But anyway - can you post which vim are you using (command line, gui)?
Also, if it's terminal vim, then can you please post terminal (Terminal.all in OSX, iTerm, or something else)?

[neolus]

my bad, I'm using gvim 7.4.335-4




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[Michael Henry]

> On Wednesday, June 25, 2014 3:29:38 PM UTC+2, neolus wrote:
>> Hello, I simply wanted to redirect Alt + Space in insert mode to a plain
>> space but this seems more complicated than I thought.

I see from a later post that you're running gvim. Normally that
makes mapping keys fairly straightforward, but mapping alt-space
seems to be an anomaly, at least for me running Gvim under KDE
on Linux. I usually have alt-space mapped for a system-wide
function, so I'd never tried mapping it in Gvim before. I get
the same behavior as you. A common way to determine which codes
are sent by pressing a key is to enter insert mode, press Ctrl-V
(or Ctrl-Q if you've got Ctrl-V mapped, which is sometimes done
on Microsoft Windows), then press the key in question. It
should insert its key code into the buffer for examination.
When I try this with alt-space, nothing happens until I press
another key. I think this means you may not have much success
trying to map alt-space in Gvim, at least without a more
thorough look into Gvim's guts to see what's going on under the
hood.

On 06/25/2014 11:25 AM, Bruno Sutic wrote:
> I've tried to make a plugin that consistently enables alt mappings in vim.
> https://github.com/bruno-/vim-alt-mappings

Hi, Bruno,

I took a quick look at your plugin page, and I see you've got it
marked "experimental" because of some unsolved issues. You
might like to take a look at my "fixkey" plugin to see how it
handles some of the issues you bring up:
https://github.com/drmikehenry/vim-fixkey

Michael Henry

[John Little]

Alt-whatever often belongs to the DE, and alt-space is used by windows and gnome at least; so, what OS? and desktop environment if linux?

Regards, John Little

[Michael Henry]

On 06/26/2014 02:03 AM, John Little wrote:
> Alt-whatever often belongs to the DE, and alt-space is used by
> windows and gnome at least; so, what OS? and desktop
> environment if linux?

In my case, I'm running Linux (Fedora 20) and KDE. While mostly
I configure KDE such that alt-space opens the window operations
menu (to match the equivalent behavior in Windows), I unmapped
this key for my Vim tests. In that environment, I can run gvim
and enter insert mode. When I press alt-space once, nothing
visible happens. Pressing alt-space again yields the following
character inserted into the buffer: Â

Using a unicode decoder, I see this is Unicode code point
U+00C2, "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX".

Testing in a terminal emulator (KDE Konsole), I run:

cat

then press alt-space. As with other alt keys in this terminal,
alt-space is encoded as an escape character followed by a space
(<Esc><Space> in Vim's notation). In console Vim, this is in
fact what I get when I enter insert mode and press alt-space.

Gvim is a different story, though. I don't really know how keys
are encoded and received by Gvim, other than to say that
pressing alt-space twice causes insertion of the "Â" character
on my system.

Since the original poster shows similar behavior (pressing
alt-space appears to do nothing, but following that keypress
with <F2> causes <80> to be inserted), I suspect alt-space isn't
mapped to anything outside of Gvim in his environment.

Michael Henry